


Risks

by lilyconrad



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Brotp, Clone Brothers, Clones, Vod - Freeform, we met before we met
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21619936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyconrad/pseuds/lilyconrad
Summary: Hello, alyyks! Hope you like it! <3
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex
Comments: 8
Kudos: 77
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	Risks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alyyks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/gifts).

> Hello, alyyks! Hope you like it! <3

The boy is blond.

It brings him a sort of infamy he enjoys. He is not shunned: a brother is a brother. But as he and his brothers play and train together, they all wait for him to be pulled from the cadet ranks to join the maintenance crew. 

So does he.

He figures it will happen sooner or later. How could it not, as different as he is? But it’s liberating in a way, and so he delights in taking risks in the parade of physical and mental assessments that make up their lives. He takes even more risks when the Makers are looking the other way.

The boy has succeeded in both areas so far, and is very pleased with himself every time he pulls off another night-time stunt. He’s been to the top floor of the training hall in the small hours of the morning and looked out over the neat squares of the field just like the Makers do during their drills. He’s been to the mess halls, which he finds empty and boring in the dark with all the food locked up. The medical floor fascinates him despite the fact he can only get into a few of the larger storage areas, lost in endless shadows of items large and strange all around him.

When the brothers begin whispering about a sea monster that has taken residence below their ocean home, the creature lurking among the support pillars that keep the maze of white and grey above water, the boy’s curiosity can only take so much. 

“Its body is longer than the training halls! And it has fangs as big as we are!” “No, they’re bigger!” “I heard he ate Thirty-Five-Eighteen!” “No, stupid, he broke his leg and they’re fixing him up.” “But I’ll bet the monster COULD eat him!”

The boy decides to go see this monster the following night, to go down toward the ocean waves that crash around their home rather than up toward the restricted levels. It feels strange and almost too easy as he descends through a series of repair shafts, but who would guard against someone as small as him?

The sound of the sea grows louder, and he creaks a final gate open to slip out onto a narrow band of walkway winding around a vast pillar. The night air is cold and salty and wonderful, given how rarely he and his brothers go outside, and he takes a deep breath before it freezes in his lungs.

There is another boy further down the walkway, gripping the railing and leaning out as far as he can over the water. Despite the permanent gloom of the shadows under the complex, it’s clear he’s as dark-haired as all the other cadets. He’s one of the normal ones. _ He shouldn’t be here! He shouldn’t want to be here! _ the boy thinks with half-annoyance and half admiration. “Hey!”

The other boy jumps. “What are you doing here?” he snaps, clearly caught off guard.

The blond boy grins. “Same as you. Breaking rules.”

He gets an offended frown in return. “I just wanted to see it.”

“Is it here?”

“Yeah.” The newcomer points down into the indigo shadows rocking back and forth around the rows of pillars, the waves lit a dim silver by the glow of moonlight out on the open ocean beyond them. “It’s not that big though.”

The boy walks over to join him, curiosity creating an uneasy truce between them. “What is it?”

“Looks like one of the sea hunter-serpents we learned about a while back. Maybe a juvenile.”

“Maybe it just wants to be a cadet. Maybe it’s trying to find a way in.”

“Nah, it’s got too long of a neck. The Makers would be jealous.”

They both snicker. In a way, joking about their creators seems more daring than standing out in the dark with a strange form drifting in lines of scales and fins below.

“I’m Twenty-Two,” the interloper says as a peace offering, shortening his numbers the way friends do in the small groups they all live in.

“Seventy-Five.”

Twenty-Two doesn’t say that he already knows, that the blond Seventy-Five’s number is known all through the barrack halls. Seventy-Five decides he likes him. 

“I want to get closer to it,” Twenty-Two says, already looking around at the walkway. “Are there any autostairs down from here?”

“There have to be, for any of the surface droids they send out to do repairs.” Seventy-Five points at a dark, bulky shape sticking out of the catwalk further down. “Are those some?”

It takes only a few minutes for Twenty-Two to figure out the code needed to activate the folded stack of metal, and Seventy-Five is pleased to see his new friend is as quick to break it as he would be. “Almost the same as the barracks door,” Twenty-Two winks as he punches the last buttons lit up green. “They just switch out the last number to the room number.”

“Not like they need much internal security with all of us being so perfect and well-behaved,” Seventy-Five deadpans.

“Nah, not at all!”

The steps slide out in a ring downward to the ocean surface with loud creaks lost in the sweep of the waves to anyone but them, and the serpent shies away, circling back out around a few columns before snaking its way back. It is much bigger than they are, in the length of its body if not in its fangs, and its fins ripple the waves as it dives beneath the water and disappears.

“Where is it?” Seventy-Five asks from the top of the stairs as Twenty-Two pads down with careful steps to the shifting dark of the water’s surface.

“Not sure,” Twenty-Two calls. “I think it’s under the stairs.” He leans out, one hand on the cool metal railing that rose up as the steps fanned out, trying to swing himself around the edge to see underneath.

Seventy-Five peers down with a squint. “I think it might be out by--”

Twenty-Two is there and then he is not, gone under sprays of water thrown from the ocean in a violent jolt as the creature flings itself upward and drags him under.

“NO!” Seventy-Five pounds down the steps and flings himself in to another loud slap of water and spray. Twenty-Two is thrashing about, pounding away at the serpent’s neck as best he can as it snaps madly at him in return. 

Blood pours down the side of his face from a bite and he punches and kicks with blind panic at the creature slithering around him. 

“Kick harder!” Seventy-Five yells as he climbs atop the serpent in rough grabs and splashes to jerk its head back as best he can, slinging his legs around its neck and jamming his hand under one scale to try to rip it out. “Hurry!”

Seventy-Five is terrified. All his life he has been carefully minded and watched, the only tests he and his brothers have been put in ones designed by their makers to be difficult but not dangerous. 

This thing is different. This thing wants to kill his new friend. It wants to kill him. And no one is around to call this off with soft blue lights and disappointed sighs.

Twenty-Two claws himself halfway out of its grip and pulls himself up the first few steps, hands tight on the bottom rails of the stairs. The grated steps are wet and slick, and when he lands a lucky kick square in the serpent’s eye it slides back loose and thrashing into the water.

Seventy-Five tumbles back into the water with it, a breathless scream choking him. The serpent is no longer trying to attack him, but in its writhing panic it’s looped a coil around his leg and he feels a sharp pull as it tries to tell up from down and which direction to dart off in.

_ No, no, please! _

Another coil yanks around his throat and jerks. For a split-second, beneath his panic, he is utterly puzzled as to why this one is pulling him in the opposite direction of the creature and then he is gasping on the stairs with Twenty-Two’s hand bunched into the back of his sleep clothes and the collar of his shirt dug painfully tight into his throat.

The serpent gives a final, angry splash of its tail as it throws itself away from them and shoots off toward the moonlight and open water beyond the complex, leaving the two boys lying sore and soaking wet along the middle steps.

“Ow,” Twenty-Two mumbles into the cold grating, adrenaline making his pain less a sensation than an abstract concept.

“Kajj, your face! It’s bleeding everywhere!” Seventy-Five hisses, sitting up and pulling Twenty-Two up with him. “You need a medic!”

“No, it’s... just the one side. Looks worse than it is, uh, maybe?” he winces.

The two boys make their way back up the repair shafts to the lower levels of the cadet barracks, Twenty-Two’s night shirt twisted and wrapped around the side of his face to stop the worst of the bleeding and both of them hurting from the ghosts of bruises that will rise up later.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” Seventy-Five asks when they get to the intersection of corridors that marks where they’ll split off to their own barracks.

“I’ll pick a fight before morning,” Twenty-Two sighs, pushing the wadded cloth tighter against his face with a grimace and muttered curse. “It’s still the night-cycle for awhile so in the dark no one’ll see my face until after the fight. I’ll dump someone out of their bunk or something and make sure they hit me in the face a couple of times.” 

He turns, shadows not enough to hide his serious expression. “Thanks, Seventy-Five. I mean it.”

“You saved me, Twenty-Two. We’re even.”

“Yeah, I guess.” They part with a grin and a wave, and lost in the vast numbers of cadets, they don’t see each other again.

Until long after, when they are introduced by their respective Jedi generals over a planning table in a star destroyer’s war room. The Jedi turn back to their maps as the commander looks at the captain and his blond hair, and the captain looks at the commander with his lines of scars along the side of his face. 

They grin the same way they did that night, but when the Jedi turn to ask their opinions about the battle plans they are met with only solemn expressions.


End file.
